Publications dealing with the medieval period are organized by language of the material studied. A more general section, dealing with early modern and modern western European texts, follows. All articles are peer-reviewed, with the exception of a few culinary notes, and online postings of drafts, marked with * and deleted after regular publication. Then follow brief etymologies of the (mostly) English words that are discussed in the purely lexical studies, the titles of books translated, and book reviews. Last is a strictly chronological listing of articles.

The Etymology of Iroquois: ‘Killer People’ in a Basque-Algonquian Pidgin or an Echo of Norse Irland it mikla ‘Greater Ireland’? Onomastica Canadiana 88 (2006): 43-56. The article was incorporated in lecture form in Timothy J. Anderson’s one-act play The Etymology of Iroquois, premiered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 2008.

The Bound and the Binding: The Lyre in Early Ireland. In Proceedings of the First North American Congress of Celtic Studies, 1986. Ed. Gordon W. MacLennan. Ottawa: Chair of Celtic Studies, University of Ottawa, 1988. Pp. 365-385.

Cerrce, an Archaic Epithet of the Dagda, Cernnunos, and Conall Cernach. The Journal of Indo-European Studies 16 (1988): 341-364.

Irish Evidence for the De Harmonia Tonorum of Wulfstan of Winchester. Mediaevalia 14 (1988): 23-38.

Ludarius: Slang and Symbol in the Life of St. Máedóc of Ferns. Studia Monastica 30 (1988): 291-304.

Warrior Initiation and Some Short Celtic Spears in the Irish and Learned Latin Traditions. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 11 (1989): 87-108.

A Cut Above: Ration and Station in an Irish King’s Hall. Food and Foodways 4 (1990): 89-110.

Tripartition in the Early Irish Tradition: Cosmic or Social Structure? In Indo-European Religion after Dumézil. Ed. Edgar C. Polomé. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series 16. Washington: Institute for the Study of Man, 1996. Pp. 156-183.

Deficient Royal Rule: The King’s Proxies, Judges and the Instruments of his Fate. In Essays on the Early Irish King Tales: Rígscéla Érenn. Ed. Daniel M. Wiley. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. Pp. 104-126.

Fusion and Fission in the Love and Lexis of Early Ireland. In Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages. Ed. Albrecht Classen. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008. Pp. 95-109.

August Strindberg, “Måste,” from Giftas, edited with an introduction, notes, glossary, and illustrations, 65 p. (unpublished).

Gulliver’s Wounded Knee. Swift Studies 7 (1992): 106-109.

C. S. Lewis and the Toponym Narnia. Mythlore 84 (1998): 54-55, 58.

A Treatise from Enlightenment Sweden on `Teaching the Mute to Read and Speak.’ The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 4 (1999): 321-330.

Proust’s Prescription: Sickness as Pre-condition for Writing. (With Lois Bragg). Literature and Medicine 19 (2000): 165-181. Since Lois’s name change to Edna Edith Sayers, her web page is now found at http://www.EESayers.com.

The Dory on the Mosquito Coast and Grand Banks. The American Neptune 62:1 (2002): 111-117.

Joe Hill’s ‘Pie in the Sky’ and Swedish Reflexes of the Land of Cockaigne. American Speech 77 (2002): 331-336.

Scones, the OED, and the Celtic Element of English Vocabulary. Notes and Queries 52 (2005): 447-450.

Crank and careen. Notes and Queries 53 (2006): 306-308.

The Etymology of Iroquois: ‘Killer People’ in a Basque-Algonquian Pidgin or an Echo of Norse Írland it mikla? Onomastica Canadiana 88 (2006): 43-56. The article was incorporated in lecture form in Timothy J. Anderson’s one-act play The Etymology of Iroquois, premiered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 2008.

The Ancestry of John Doe: A Squib. Eolas: The Journal of the American Society of Medieval Irish Studies 5 (2011): 193-198. (As the result of a misunderstanding, this note also appeared in Miscelánea 45 (2012): 119-124.

*Speculation on the Origin of English welsh ‘to renege on payment of money owed’ (with a consideration of jew and gyp), November, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/s/36e8970c29/speculation-on-the-origin-of-English-welsh?source=link

Occluding Deafness in the Paradigm of Head-Related Disfigurement in Heroes and Their Wives in Medieval Irish Epic Texts.

Perceval and Pierced Limbs: Myth and History.

Sausage and Scurrility in Kormáks saga.

The Stylistic Conventions of Skaldic Invective.

ETYMOLOGIES

A surprisingly large number of words in the vocabulary of English are without a satisfactory identification of origin and account of early history. To illustrate the kind of scholarly work still to be done, this section offers summary etymological notes on about 120 English words previously without adequate historical explanation. The range is from familiar but problematic ‘isolates’ (e.g., dog) through less common, often technical, terms, to words of mainstream English. More ample discussion of each word is found in the author’s studies listed at the end of each note. The list is drawn from work prior to 2014. Subsequent lexical studies are listed only in the preceding bibliography and addendum.

balderdash < Irish béal ‘mouth; speech’ + diardanach ‘churlish, angry’, originally a compound meaning ‘coarse speech’ when introduced into underclass speech in 17 c. London, later ‘nonsense’. A hypothetical Scots Gaelic equivalent, *beuldiardachd, is phonologically even closer. Note, too, the possible influence at an early stage of English balder ‘to use coarse language’; ‘A Miscellany of English Etymologies with Some Thoughts on Isolates and Loans’ (under review).

bastard < Old French bastard < deprecatory French suffix -ard attached to a derivative of Old Frankish *bastjan ‘to plait, weave, stitch loosely’, used figuratively of the offspring of a socially and legally loose sexual union; ‘Bastard and basket: The Etymologies Reviewed,’ Leeds Studies in English 39 (2009): 117-25.

beat as in ‘to beat to the windward’, i.e., to tack, to sail diagonally in the general direction from which the wind is blowing, < Anglo-French and Norman beiter < Old Norse beita ‘to cause to bite’, as of a ship or sail, into the wind; ‘More Nautical Etymologies,’ Notes and Queries 58 (2011): 42-50.

bob in the sense of cutting a woman’s hair short; < Anglo-French beaubelet ‘ornament, small globular mass’ (cf. English bauble, plumb bob), influenced by Middle English bobben, babbelen ‘to swing to and fro, or up and down’ (cf. Middle English babyl ‘scale-beam, jester’s scepter’, the latter meaning possibly affected by Middle English babbelen ‘to babble’); ‘Challenges Facing English Etymology in the Twenty-First Century, with Illustrations,’ Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 1-25.

boondocks originally British, then U.S., military slang, < Irish buannacht ‘billeting’, buannaidheacht ‘the experience of billeting’, especially at a remote location; ‘Contested Etymologies of Some English Words in the Popular Register,’ Studia Neophilologica 80 (2008): 15-29.

Canuck as originally used of a French-Canadian in New England; from 16th c. Basque kanoako ‘canoe person’ or Basque kanatako ‘resident in an Iroquoian settlement, < Iroquoian kaná:ta’ (to use a modern spelling) ‘town, village’, compounds incoporating the Basque relational suffix -ko; not < Iroquoian kanuchsa (kanónhsa’ in modern Mohawk orthography), supposedly ‘the resident of a kanata or community’ but actually Iroquoian for ‘house’, not its inhabitant; ‘Etymologies of Canuck,’ Onomastica Canadiana 95 (2016): 75-84.

cap in ‘to set one’s cap at’, i.e., have amorous or marital ambitions with respect to a certain person, < French mettre le cap sur ‘to point the (ship’s) head in a given direction’; ‘”To set one’s cap at someone”: Head-Gear or Ship’s Head?’ Notes and Queries 57 (2010): 336-37.

carwitchet as pun, quibble, conundrum, < Irish ceartuighthe ‘corrected, set right’ (< ceart ‘right, just’), introduced to the life about town of early 17 c. London.

cater-cornered, kitty-corners (U.S.) < Anglo-French cater ‘quarter’, referencing diagonally opposed corners of a square or the apices of two quarters of a square that are created by intersecting diagonal lines; ‘Kitty-corners,’ ANQ 26.3 (2013): 161-162.

chitterling as the small intestine of certain animals and the derivative culinary dishes, tripe or sausage; from Middle English kettling (< kettle) but possibly via the Norse-inflected speech of the Danelaw from Old Norse *ketillingar ‘little products of the cooking pot; ‘A Miscellany of English Etymologies with Some Thoughts on Isolates and Loans’ (under review).

chowder fish and seafood soup, < French chaudière ‘kettle, cooking pot’, especially as used at sea, under the influence of Old French chaudumé ‘a kind of sauce’, seen in chaudumée de brochet ‘pike chowder’; ‘Chowder: Origin and Early History of the Name,’ Petits Propos Culinaires 91 (2010): 88-93.

colt from a Brittonic (Old British) root *kappal- (cognate with Gaulish caballos ‘draft horse’) plus a diminutive suffix in –t-, assumed into early Old English; ‘Speculations on Sub-Stratum Influence on Early English Vocabulary: pig, colt, frog,’Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (forthcoming).

cove as ‘guy, fellow’, now dated underclass English slang. Despite the OED’s referral to possible Scottish parallels (cofe ‘pedlar’) and dismissive summary (‘the origin of the word still remains obscure’), cove is readily referred to Anglo-Romani and the Romani masculine demonstrative adjective kova ‘this man’ (subsequently used as a noun).

cue as theatrical prompt; possibly from Anglo-French queue, cowe ‘tail’ as used, along with pee ‘foot’, for the ‘foot of fine’, or bottom third of an indenture, the copy of the text that remained with the Kings court. This part, marked Q, may have served as model for marking up theater scripts, on which individual actors might enter a Q at the beginnings of their speeches.

dour from Scots, this in turn from Scots Gaelic dùr, derived from Old Irish dúr (with the same range of meanings as dour), the Irish form a loan from early medieval Church Latin durus ‘hard, unfeeling’; ‘Dour: Etymology,’ Notes and Queries 59 (2012): 337-38.

drudgein the sense of kitchen worker; < Germanic *truhtsezzo ‘seneschal, ard’ (cf. Late Latin drossatus); the loss of prestige and downward mobility may be due to the introduction of these last two terms into the offices of aristocratic households; ‘Scullions, Cook’s Knaves, and Drudges,’ Notes and Queries 56: 4 (2009): 499-502.

dude ‘pretentious or sharp dresser’ and later ‘guy, fellow’ of one’s social group, often in the vocative, ‘hey! dude!’; < Irish daoi ‘fool’, extended to ‘fop’, or dúid ‘craning neck; cad’; a slang term transferred from the immigrant Irish community in America (most likely in New York) to English-language journalism in the 1880s, later incorporated in the phrase dude ranch (1921).

escrow < Anglo-French escrowe < Old French esrcoue ‘piece, scrap’ < Frankish *skrôda‘ditto’; the Norman and Anglo-Norman reflex was affected by Old Norse skrá ‘strip of hide’, so that the narrower signification ‘piece of parchment’ dominated and led, via Law French, to the early modern form escrow and the meaning ‘appendix attached to a legal document’, eventually to only its contents, e.g. a contractual agreement concerning monies held in escrow, while Middle English continued Anglo-French escrowe as scrue in the more general meanings of ‘piece, piece of parchment, document’; ‘Escrow: Etymology and Early History’ (forthcoming).

esethe Spanish masculine singular demonstrative adjective and pronoun, now a familiar Mexican and Chicano apostrophe, ‘dude, buddy’; loan translation from Romani and the para-Romani dialect of Andalusia, Caló (the in-group language of the Spanish ‘gypsies’), where such use of demonstratives is recorded. In the Americas, Spanish ese, nominally ‘that, that one’, is substituted for a Caló form such as ocoba but the function of the earlier word is retained, for a meaning of roughly ‘that specific man here under consideration’, that is, you, my friend.

finagle in the sense ‘to use dishonest or devious methods to bring something about’ (OED), adaptation of finical ‘over-nice or particular, affectedly fastidious, excessively punctilious or precise, in speech, dress, manners, methods of work’, current from the 16th to 19th centuries. In the semantic development, conceit is equated with deceit and attention to detail with insider knowledge and conniving.

flabbergast originally Scottish,< Old French fable ‘fable, invention’ in its variant flable, adopted as flaba or flabber + English gast or agast ‘to confound’, with the meaning ‘to confuse, confound, astonish with verbal invention’; Flabbergast (forthcoming).

flamenco Spanish, ostensibly ‘Fleming’, in reference to the style and content of various performing arts, < Caló flamar, reportedly ‘to joke, fool around’ but assumed to have a deeper subtext, < Andalusian flamar ‘to flame, be ardent’, which is seen as a loan translation from a Romani form such as phabárdol ‘to burn, catch fire; to become enthusiastic; to fall in love; to be fooled’; ‘Spanish flamenco: Origin, Loan Translation, and In- and Out-group Evolution (Romani, Caló, Castilian),’ Romance Notes 48 (2007): 13-22.

freak related to English frecken (archaic) < Middle English fraken ‘freckle’, originally used figuratively of a willed or unwilled intrusion in the color or pattern of a fabric; ‘Contested Etymologies of Some English Words in the Popular Register,’ Studia Neophilologica 80 (2008): 15-29.

frog from a reconstructed Old British (Brittonic) form *frogna ‘croaker, frog’, on the analogy of Gaulish srogna >ðrogna >frogna ‘nose, nostril’, from the Indo-European root *srenk- ‘to snore’; British frogna would have coalesced with Germanic frosc in Britain to give Old English frogga; ‘Speculations on Sub-Stratum Influence on Early English Vocabulary: pig, colt, frog,’Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (forthcoming).

gander as in ‘have a gander’; not originally associated with the name of the male goose but derived from Old French and Anglo-French gandir ‘to stray, deviate’, which aligned itself with English wander in Middle English, leading to an association of gander and wander (as in the nursery rhyme ‘Goosey goosey gander, whither shall I wander’). Later, interplay with gawk led both words to reference both idle perambulation and rubber-necking, with the image of the long-necked goose and gander in the background.

girl Middle English gerl, via an unattested Old English form, < Old British (Brittonic) *gabrillos ‘kid’, young goat’ or *iarillos ‘chick’, loaned into Anglo-Saxon (early Old English) as a term for a child of either sex; ‘Challenges Facing English Etymology in the Twenty-First Century, with Illustrations,’ Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 1-25.

gusset < Old French gousset, originally a figurative term for the armpit, then the triangular patch of chain mail that covered it (now extended to fabrics), < Old French gousse ‘pod of a legume’, itself possibly derived < Frankish *guz ‘casting, an object made in a mould’, the pod being compared to the opened mould, an image still relevant to a raised arm that exposes an armpit.

ha-ha as a dry moat around a garden; not from ha! ha! as an expression of surprise on encountering such a stone- and turf-faced ditch or from an equivalent French exclamation, but from Frankish *haga ‘enclosed piece of land’, which entered Gallo-Romance and was preserved in later French. A related Frankish word developed as Old French haie ‘fence, hedge’ so that French hahha, from which the English term was loaned in the early 18th c., may represent a disambiguated, more specialized application, perhaps originally a military or ritual one.

harp as in the expression ‘agree like harp and harrow’, i.e., not at all; originally based on harp, an agricultural instrument in the form of a sieve made up of a frame and wire, for sifting soil. Thus harp and harrow are two images drawn from the same sphere. Today harp is doubtless understood as the musical instrument in the now obsolete expression; ‘Like harp and harrow‘ (forthcoming).

honeycomb < Old English *hunig-waba = hunig ‘honey’ + *waba ‘web, woven artifact’ (cf. Old High German waba ‘honeycomb’), with a shift of word boundary to *huni-gwaba, followed by re-identification of the second element as comb (folk etymology); ‘An Early Set of Bee-keeping Words in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English,’ ANQ 22:2 (2009): 8-13.

hooligan as a member of a British street gang; perhaps, like the Irish name Houlihan (Ó hUallacháin), from Irish uall- ‘pride’ (cf. uallach ‘vain, boastful’, uallachán ‘coxcomb’), for a self-chosen name with a meaning like ‘the Cocks of the Walk’.

hurdy-gurdy originally probably ‘tumult, uproar’, later the name of a lute-shaped, stringed musical instrument operated with a crank, resined wheel, and keys; Old Franish hurd ‘hurdle’ > Old French hourdis ‘hurdle, scaffolding’, the tight weave or plaiting of the hurdle then metaphorically extended to a mêlée; loaned into Middle English as hourdis and complemented by a second, reduplicating element to yield hurdy-gurdy; ‘Etymology and the Problem of Isolates and Loans’ (forthcoming).

jinx not from Greek ἴυγξ or Latin iynx, the wryneck, a small woodpecker, implicated in ancient love philters and charms, but from Scots jink ‘a sudden, evasive movement’, used of Rugby football, then, in America, as jinks/jinx, in a transferred sense to identify the cause of an almost supernatural, inexplicable, recurrent loss in sports; ‘Two Etymologies: spree and jinx,’ Scottish Language (forthcoming).

kidney Middle English nere ‘kidney’ (< Old English *nere) + kid ‘pod-shaped (organ)’, to distinguish the word from a near homonym; perceived as a plural, kidnere was given the singular form kidney; ‘Some Disputed Etymologies: kidney, piskie/pixie, tatting and slang,’ Notes and Queries 57 (2010): 172-79.

lacks in the international trade jargon of the 18 c., bricks or bags of gum lacquer from south-east Asia, used in the production of varnish; ‘East India Company Lacks,’ The Mariner’s Mirror 99 (2013), online.

lanyard originally short lengths of rope used on board ship; Middle English lainer < Anglo-French lasniere (metathesized form of *nasle < Old Frankish*nastila ‘lace, thong’), recast by seamen on the analogy of halyard, sailyard; ‘Challenges Facing English Etymology in the Twenty-First Century, with Illustrations,’ Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 1-25.

luff ‘weather edge of a sail’, < Norman French and Anglo-French lof ‘sail pin, boomkin’, earlier l’of, < Old Norse úfr ‘splinter, thorn’ (in a figurative use that likens the gunwale and sail-pin to a branch with a thorn); ‘A Norse Etymology for luff “the weather edge of a sail”,’ The American Neptune 62: 1 (2002): 111-17.

malarkey first popularized on the American west coast, < Irish meallaireacht /malaracht/ ‘deception, allurement, amusement’, recast by English-speakers to align with the Irish name Malarkey; ‘Malarkey and its Etymology,’ Western Folklore 61 (2002): 209-212.

mare’s nest as ‘an untidy or confused mess, a misconception’; generally associated with mare as the female of the horse but more likely mare < Old English mera ‘a spirit producing a feeling of suffocation in a sleeping person or animal, a spectre, hag’; ‘Challenges Facing English Etymology in the Twenty-First Century, with Illustrations,’ Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 1-25.

marlingspike a metal tool for opening the strands of a nautical line; ultimately traceable, via many languages of the Atlantic seaboard and multiple transformations, some driven by folk etymology, to Middle Low German merling ‘reinforcing (cord to be wound around a heavier rope)’; ‘Fid and Marlingspike: Etymologies,’ The Mariner’s Mirror 99.3 (2013): 309-312.

oaf originally ‘elf-child, changeling’, < Old Norse álfr ‘elf’, assumed but unattested in Norman French *aufe, whence Middle and early Modern English spellings auf, aufe, ouphe, oaf, influenced in the later meanings of ‘large, clumsy or boorish person’ by Old French and Middle English auphin ‘elephant’, the name for a chess piece now known as the bishop in English and le fou in French; ‘Three Rustic Etymologies: lout, oaf, dolt,’ Notes and Queries 58 (2011): 493-95.

painter a short rope used to secure a ship’s anchor or ship’s boat; Old French poigneur ‘something that seizes’ (cf. poing ‘fist’), > Anglo-French *poinneur > Middle English peintour, pentre under the effects of folk etymology (cf. painter ‘one who paints’); ‘Anchor-painter, bow-painter: Etymology,’ The Mariner’s Mirror 97:3 (2011): 357-58.

parbuckling as a means of hoisting heavy objects with a set of slings, especially in a nautical context; < Anglo-French *parboucler ‘to buckle about thoroughly’ = French prefix par in a perfective sense + verb boucler < boucle ‘buckle’; for a time recast, on the analogy of carbuncle and its variants, as parbuncle; ‘Parbuckling,’ The Mariner’s Mirror (forthcoming).

penguin < Welsh or Breton pen gwyn ‘white headland’, referencing the guano-covered cliffs at the northeastern corner of Funk Island, Newfoundland, a seamark in the Age of Discovery; later used of the black-and-white Great Auk, which bred on the island; ‘Mackerel and penguin: International Words of the North Atlantic,’ NOWELE 56-57 (2009): 41-52.

Perceval personal name popularized by Arthurian romance, apparently < Old French perce-val ‘pierce-valley’ but more surely ultimately traceable to a Welsh name with glin ’knee’(e.g., Gwan-glin ‘Pierced knee’), misunderstood in the transmission of the tale of this young hero as glyn ‘valley’. In the symbolism inherited from the common Indo-European culture, a ‘pierced knee’ would represent dysfunctional relations between generations or even failure to produce progeny, with the knee seen as the archetypical articulated joint (cf. Perceval’s likely uncle, the crippled Fisher King); ‘An Archaic Tale-Type Determinant of Chrétien’s Fisher King and Grail,’ Arthuriana 21:2 (2012): 85-101.

pernickety, (U.S.) persnickety, originally Scottish, < Anglo-French and medieval French par niceté ‘out of foolishness’, later ‘out of fastidiousness’ (cf. shifting significations of medieval and modern English nice); ‘Pernickety,’Scottish Language 20 (2010): 87-90.

pig Old English *picga, *pigga, with a variety of cognates only in Netherlandic and northern German dialects (bagge, bigge, pogge, etc., all meaning ‘young pig’), < Gaulish moccos ‘pig’, Moccos, a pig god, and/or Baco, another Celtic porcine divinity; ‘Speculations on Sub-Stratum Influence on Early English Vocabulary: pig, colt, frog,’Medieval and Early Modern English Studies (forthcoming).

pigs and whistles now understood as ‘fragments, odds and ends’, originally pig ‘earthenware pot’ and wissel ‘alternating assumption of responsibility’, such as for the cost of a round of drinks in a tavern (cf. Old English wrixl ‘exchange’ and the originally rare but now commonplace pub name, The Pig and Whistle). With the loss of initial meaning, such phrases as pig’s whistle, pig’s whisper were generated; ‘Pigs and Whistles,’ ANQ 25 (2012): 75-77.

pimp as procurer and manager of a prostitute; orginally an errand boy, then various kinds of intermediary, eventually a pander or procurer (cognate with German Pimpf young lad’).

pun < Anglo-French puint, Middle English punct (in separate developments of Latin punctum), in a jurisprudential context = the matter at issue, an item, legal provision, possibly influenced by Irish puinn (itself borrowed from French or English), introduced to the life about town of early 17 c. London as the debatable point, the word or idea played with (cf. carwitchet).

salmagundi in the seventeenth century a spicy dish of mixed meats or fish; from late fifteenth or later French salmigondis, a compound derived from salamine ‘a fish dish’ or salaminée, a related sauce (on the Latin roots sal ‘salt’ or salsus ‘salty’) + condin < French condir ‘to season, spice’; the English semantics influenced by earlier loans to Middle English of salomene, salmene, fish and meat dishes, broths, and sauces; ‘Salmagundi,’ Notes and Queries 59 (2012): 335-37.

selvage also selvedge ‘the edge of a piece of woven material finished in such a manner as to prevent the ravelling out of the weft’ (OED), understood as self + edge; counterpart in early modern Dutch selfegghe (modern Dutch zelfegge) with Low German cognates, but plausibly a loan or loan translation into English as a consequence of Henry I’s policy of bringing Flemish weavers to England in the twelfth century; ‘Selvage‘, Notes and Queries (forthcoming)‘

shenanigans from Irish sean ‘old, habitual’ + anachain ‘harm, damage, accident’, for a familiar meaning like ‘old tricks’; first recorded in North American English in California in about 1850; ‘A Miscellany of English Etymologies with Some Thoughts on Isolates and Loans’ (under review).

shoat a weaned piglet, less than a year of age, < Middle English shoden ‘to separate’ < Old English sceotan (cf. modern English shed, also < sceotan), in the technical sense of separating (weaning) the young of domestic animals from their dams; ‘Challenges Facing English Etymology in the Twenty-First Century, with Illustrations,’ Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 1-25.

spurtle in Scots English a wooden stirring stick for oatmeal porridge; < Old Norse sproti ‘sprout, twig, stick, rod’, with metathesis of the –r- and the addition of a conventional English-language suffix, Scottish Language (forthcoming).

squeamish < Norman and Anglo-French escoymus, with a similar range of meanings, ultimately from Old Norse skömm ‘shame’, the concern for honor gradually becoming one for societal decency and bodily purity; ‘Squeamish’ (forthcoming).

steak judged a loan from Old Norse steik (cf. English to stoke) but the presence of the same loan in medieval Irish (staic) allows of the possibility that Scandinavian settlers in the future Danelaw in central and eastern England may have had affiliations with Norse settlements in Ireland.

steward traditionally derived from a hypothetical Old English *stig-weard, in which stig, more commonly ‘ladder’, would mean ‘hall’, completed by weard ‘guardian’; a preferable derivation is more directly from OE sti, the antecedent of modern English sty (as in pig-sty), in generic terms an enclosed structure with a forecourt and roofed section. The steward would then initially have been the keeper of the entrance to the lord’s hall; ‘Stew, sty and steward,’ Notes and Queries 63 (2013): 373-76.

storey < Anglo-French estor ‘store-house, stock’, with a shift in semantics from the function of lofts over ground-floor rooms to the the architectural feature of addiitonal full-sizelevels in a building; ‘A Miscellany of English Etymologies with Some Thoughts on Isolates and Loans’ (under review).

syllabub as milk curdled with wine or cider, and sweetened and flavored; initially a northern British term < Old Norse sil ‘strainer’ + bub, originally a term for a mixture of meal and yeast with warm wort and water, used to promote fermentation. An original *silebub then experienced many differing spellings, concluding with syllabub under the influence of syllable.

Relisted here are etymological studies of words that have come to be closely associated with national or community identity, so that speakers feel that they have a stake in the explanation of their historical origins. One etymology or explanation may be more ‘acceptable’ to the community, more consistent with its view of itself, than another. At the same time these are words for which popular explanations tend to be numerous and contradictory, since so much is riding on them. This said, the author claims no special expertise in the mentalities of nationalism, at one end of the scale, or of in-groups at the other. Although these and comparable words are of considerable interest for the history of linguistic scholarship in and about the communities concerned, the studies listed below are organized along the axis of historical linguistics.

The Etymology of tinker, with a note on tinker’s dam. English Language Notes 39: 2 (2001): 10-12.

Adam Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance [Le choix des Juifs sous Vichy: entre soumission et résistance], Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2005.

Ulysses on Montmartre: An Earlier Ulysses in Another Nightown, A French shadow play (1910), its translation, and an essay on its relation to Joyce’s Ulysses, by Akram Midani and Erwin R. Steinberg. James Joyce Quarterly 44 (2006): 173-76.

The Bound and the Binding: The Lyre in Early Ireland. In Proceedings of the First North American Congress of Celtic Studies, 1986. Ed. Gordon W. MacLennan. Ottawa: Chair of Celtic Studies, University of Ottawa, 1988. Pp. 365‑85.

Cerrce, an Archaic Epithet of the Dagda, Cernnunos, and Conall Cernach. The Journal of Indo-European Studies 16 (1988): 341-64.

Irish Evidence for the De Harmonia Tonorum of Wulfstan of Winchester. Mediaevalia 14 (1988): 23-38.

Tripartition in the Early Irish Tradition: Cosmic or Social Structure? In Indo-European Religion after Dumézil. Ed. Edgar C. Polomé. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series 16. Washington: Institute for the Study of Man, 1996. Pp. 156-83.

Scones, the OED, and the Celtic Element in English Vocabulary. Notes & Queries 52 (2005): 447-50.

Twelfth-Century Norman and Irish Textual Evidence for Ship-Building and Sea-Faring Techniques of Scandinavian Origin. In Traders, Saints, and Pirates: The Sea in Early Medieval Northwestern Europe. The Heroic Age 8 (2005) at http://www.heroicage.org/issues/8/sayers.html.

Contested Etymologies of Some English Words in the Popular Register. Studia Neophilologica 80 (2008): 15-29.

Deficient Royal Rule: The King’s Proxies, Judges, and the Instruments of his Fate. In Essays on the Early Irish King Tales: Rígscéla Éirenn. Ed. Dan M. Wiley, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. 104-26.

The Etymologies of dog and cur. The Journal of Indo-European Studies. 36 (2008): 401-10.

Le Far de Meschines – The Strait of Messina: Origin and History of the Topographical Term. Journal of Romance Studies 8.2 (2008): 9-20.

Fusion and Fission in the Love and Lexis of Early Ireland. In Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ed. Albrecht Classen. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. 95-109.

Hoon, coon and boong in Peter Temple’s Detective Fiction. Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature 22 (2008): 165-67.